This Real-Time Video Manipulation Technology Is Both Incredible And Terrifying

This is probably the coolest most terrifying technology out there right now.

Max Planck and Researchers from Stanford, Erlangen-Nuremberg have developed software that allows for the real-time face capture and reenactment of RGB videos like YouTube.

Imagine the possibles of this type of technology… Kind of scary huh.

Researchers explained:

“We present a novel approach for real-time facial reenactment of a monocular target video sequence (e.g., Youtube video). The source sequence is also a monocular video stream, captured live with a commodity webcam. Our goal is to animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-render the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion.

To this end, we first address the under-constrained problem of facial identity recovery from monocular video by non-rigid model-based bundling. At run time, we track facial expressions of both source and target video using a dense photometric consistency measure.

Reenactment is then achieved by fast and efficient deformation transfer between source and target. The mouth interior that best matches the re-targeted expression is retrieved from the target sequence and warped to produce an accurate fit.

Finally, we convincingly re-render the synthesized target face on top of the corresponding video stream such that it seamlessly blends with the real-world illumination. We demonstrate our method in a live setup, where Youtube videos are reenacted in real time.”